Widower’s shocking letter from PayPal

PayPal was forced to apologise after sending a letter to a woman who had died of cancer, claiming her death "breached its rules".

Howard Durdle, whose wife Lindsay passed away after a battle with breast cancer on 31 May, gave the mobile payments company copies of his wife's death certificate, her will and his ID - as they had requested.

Mrs Durdle was first diagnosed with breast cancer a year-and-a-half earlier, and the disease later spread to her lungs and brain.

But the response he got from the company shocked him. He posted the letter PayPal sent to his home in the UK to Facebook, which was headlined "Important: You should read this notice carefully."

The letter said his wife owed the company about 3200 pounds ($A5700) and said: "You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased … this breach is not capable of remedy".

PayPal has since said the letter was "insensitive", apologised to the widower, and launched a probe into how the letter was sent in the first place.

"We apologise to Mr Durdle for the distress this letter has caused," the PayPal spokesman said, according to BBC.

The letter claimed his wife breached her agreement with PayPal because she was deceased. Picture: Facebook

Mr Durdle told the BBC that PayPal had given three possible explanations: a bug, a bad letter template or human error.

However, PayPal also reportedly told him it would not be able to share the information because it was an "internal matter".

"I'm in a reasonable place at the moment ─ I've got quite a level head on my shoulders ─ and am quite capable of dealing with paperwork like this," Mr Durdle, who is a member of the charity group Widowed and Young, said.

"If I'm going to make any fuss about this at all, it's to make sure that PayPal, or any other organisation that might do this kind of insensitive thing, recognises the damage they can cause the recently bereaved."

This article originally appeared in Fox News and was republished with permission.